Sixty.
Yeah, that number.
We all swear we don’t feel it — until the mirror betrays us.
Sure, genetics play their part, but so does the life we’ve lived. And for queer men of my generation, that life has been… well, intense.
Picture it. You’re twenty. Cocky, wide-eyed, unstoppable. London is calling — a neon-lit sweet shop of sex, clubs, fashion, and beautiful weirdos just like you.
I’m home. I’ve never felt so ALIVE.
Fast forward. You’re edging toward sixty. A gay man who’s seen an epic rollercoaster of joy, loss, desire, danger, and defiance.
Because let’s be real:
My generation came out into the wildfire of AIDS. We were demonised. Criminalised.
Mocked on buses and tubes with zero protection from the law — because the law was often hunting us. Having sex was a criminal offence if you were under 21. Insurance companies demanded humiliating questionnaires about who did what to whom. HIV tests meant two weeks of living on psychological death row. The papers spewed venom daily.
And then came Section 28.
And yet — yet — being gay was thrilling.
London in the eighties had an edge that’s hard to describe now. The constant hostility forged community. Rebellious, electric, intergenerational community. We looked after each other because so few others would.
That’s the world that shaped Invisible Me.
I wanted to write about Londoners hitting sixty — single, yearning, complicated. One of them is Jack, a gay man living with HIV whose partner of 35 years has recently died. His HIV-negative partner. A relationship that survived stigma, fear, shifting medical tides and everything the world hurled at them.
And let’s talk stigma. Sure, treatment since the late nineties changed everything. Today, being HIV-positive is not a death sentence. PrEP has transformed the landscape. But internalised shame — the stuff carried in your bones from decades of cultural assault — doesn’t evaporate overnight.
I wanted to explore that.
I wanted to explore ageing.
I wanted to explore what it feels like to become invisible — not just in the gay scene, but in a world increasingly mediated through screens.
Because sex, love, connection, community — they’re all wired into us. And sometimes it takes a story like Jack’s to remind us that longing doesn’t retire at fifty-five.
Invisible Me by Bren Gosling is running from 8 April – 2 May 2026 at Southwark Playhouse Borough, 77-85 Newington Causeway, London SE1 6BD, United Kingdom.
www.brengosling.com
